Criminal referrals for Trump are a historic move against a historically bad president

On Dec. 19, 2020, Donald Trump, still refusing to accept he had lost the election, invited his supporters to the nation’s capital. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” he wrote in a now-infamous tweet. “Be there, will be wild!” Exactly two years later, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol urged the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against the former president for what was unarguably an attempted coup. It was the culmination of the committee’s year-and-a-half-long investigation into Trump’s vast efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 ...